The Grey Woman and other Tales

Elizabeth Gaskell wrote The Grey Woman for Charles Dickens’s journal All the Year Round. It was intended to become a full-length novel, but was published as a short story in three parts in January 1861. The story is told from the perspective of the protagonist, Anna Scherer, daughter of a German miller, who relates her marriage to the French nobleman Monsieur de la Tourelle a gay young, elegant’ (Gaskell 2000, 339) man, who turns out to be a robber. She and her servant Amante escape from his castle, Les Rochers, and settle in Frankfurt.